Tithi Bhattacharya is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of Global Studies at Purdue University. She specializes in Modern South Asian History and writes extensively on colonialism, nation and class formation, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia. She writes regularly for Huffington Post.

FEATURED WRITINGS

Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression.

Tithi's Huffington Post Column

Tithi now has a regular spot at Huffington Post. You can subscribe and follow her writing here.

The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal

Tithi’s first book was published by Oxford University Press in 2005. The book looks at the co-constitutive relationship between processes of class formation and nation formation. The book focuses on a very specific aspect of the Bengali middle class’s social history: their obsessive preoccupation with culture and education. Reviews

Explaining Gender Violence in the Neoliberal Era

Let us begin with an image: a naked white man pursuing a low-wage Black female asylum seeker down the corridors of an expensive Manhattan hotel in order to force her to have sex with him. The man, of course, is the then-director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the woman, thirtythree-year-old Nafissatou Diallo, a housekeeper at Strauss-Kahn’s hotel. Full article

Historically, boycott is a tactic used by the dispossessed against the powerful. This is not a new tactic. Boycott has deep roots in anti-imperialist struggle, internationally. Palestinians stand alongside other anti-imperialist fighters whose rich and fierce history of struggle is worth recalling today — not simply because it ought to be part of our collective historical memory, but also because they won against their oppressors. Full article

How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class

In this essay, I refute a narrow conception of class by reactivating fundamental Marxist insights about class formation that have been obscured by four decades of neoliberalism and the many defeats of the global working class. The key to developing a sufficiently dynamic understanding of the working class, I argue, is the framework of social reproduction. In thinking about the working class, it is essential to recognize that workers have an existence beyond the workplace. Full article.

Tithi Bhattacharya is an Associate Professor of South Asian History and the Director of Global Studies at Purdue University. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005) and a long time activist for Palestinian justice. She writes extensively on Marxist theory, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia Research, Electronic Intifada, International Socialist Review, Jacobin, Salon.com and the New Left Review. She is on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review and Studies on Asia.